Various technologies may be used to authenticate and authorize a layer 2 (L2) MAC (Media Access Control) address within an L2 network without any association to layer 3 (L3) address utilization. A user may have its MAC address validated and authorized, but still act as a malicious L3 user, stealing IP (Internet Protocol) addresses from others, announcing a large number of IP addresses to exhaust some network resources (e.g., ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) or ND (Neighbor Discovery) cache), binding table), or using the IP address beyond its lifetime.
Corresponding reference characters indicate corresponding parts throughout the several views of the drawings.